Crime Time

Why the Amanda Knox Netflix Documentary Is More Illuminating than a Decade’s Worth of Trial Coverage

With extraordinary access to the now exonerated suspects—and the prosecutor who charged them—documentary filmmakers Rod Blackhurst and Brian McGinn get at the core of a murder case that gripped the world.

“The whole world knew who I had sex with: seven men! And yet I was some heinous whore: bestial, sex-obsessed, and unnatural. . . . And if I’m guilty, it means I am the ultimate figure to fear. On the other hand, if I’m innocent, it means everyone’s vulnerable. And it’s everyone’s nightmare.”

That extraordinary bit of monologue comes from Amanda Knox, a young, pretty American student who was studying in Perugia, Italy, and leading a carefree life abroad—until the morning in November 2007 when her British roommate, Meredith Kercher, was found in the house they shared, brutally slaughtered, her neck practically severed from her body. The beautiful Renaissance Italian town became, overnight—and in full view of a world panting for more and more details from the media—the venue of three major nightmares: the Kercher family’s, of course, and Amanda’s and Raffaele Sollecito’s, her Italian boyfriend, who were summarily arrested, convicted, and thrown in prison for four years for a murder neither committed, as I reported for Vanity Fair in 2008.

In January 2014, after much wooing, a pair of thirtysomething filmmakers, Rod Blackhurst and Brian McGinn, got Knox, now 29, to speak on film bluntly and with icy precision about the pain, lies, and excruciatingly inventive worldwide headlines surrounding her travails. A few months later, they received the cooperation of Sollecito, who had endured six months of solitary confinement after his conviction.

Most astonishing of all: last July, Blackhurst and McGinn also managed to persuade Giuliano Mignini, the Italian prosecutor who brought the tabloid-ready case to trial, to appear in their documentary Amanda Knox, which will premiere at the Toronto Film Festival before being released by Netflix on September 30. It is this last get that offers viewers one of the most astonishing scenes, when he blandly reveals an especially imaginative scenario. Amanda’s motive for the murder of a girl she scarcely knew, says the prosecutor, was her “lack of morality,” her desire for “pleasure at any cost,” which led her to wield a large knife “that teases then plunges” into her roommate’s neck.

Despite such lurid theorizing, Amanda Knox, unlike the bulk of nearly a decade’s worth of global press coverage around the case, refuses to editorialize, praise, or rebuke any of its protagonists, and that objective stance is precisely the strength of the film.

As McGinn told me recently, “Everyone else who had reported the story had been on the outside. I wanted to look at it from the inside out.”

This, however, was not an easy task. “When we started the film in 2011, I wasn’t sure we had all the answers,” said Blackhurst. “I told my wife, ‘I don’t think we know everything that happened in this story.’ And I find it frustrating that we live in a post-factual world when truth doesn’t matter anymore. And there are no repercussions when you write something wrong. So I thought, ‘Let’s see if we can find out the truth.’”

Due largely to this coolheaded approach, the central characters of the drama feel free to say almost anything that’s on their minds. The results are illuminating. From Mignini, recalling his thoughts when evidence (which turned out to be tainted) supposedly revealed Sollecito’s DNA on the victim’s bra clasp, found only after 46 days on the floor: “I remember colleagues complimenting me and saying, ‘At this point there’s no hope for the two of them.’ . . . Complete strangers walked up to me and congratulated me and asked to shake my hand. It gives me satisfaction . . .”

From Nick Pisa, a tabloid journalist back then for London’s Daily Mail who revealed to his readers Knox’s leaked diary: “A murder always gets people going . . . [a body is found] semi-naked, blood everywhere. What more do you want? All that’s missing is the Pope!”

As the interviews reveal, when Blackhurst and McGinn set out, the competing narratives around the case were still very much in play. After being exonerated of the murder in 2011, Knox and Sollecito had their convictions reinstated in 2014, and were acquitted finally by Italy’s highest court in 2015. (Knox is currently challenging a separate slander conviction related to the case in the European Court of Human Rights.)

“From 2011 to 2014, we didn’t know what the story was going to be [in the documentary] or how it would unfold,” Blackhurst said.

There was also a question about another serious lack at the start: ready cash. “We were two struggling filmmakers, and still are,” Blackhurst continued, “and we needed plane tickets to Perugia—so in the end we got financial help from [producer] Mette Heide, who was eventually supported by the Danish Film Institute, and that’s how we got our plane tickets. That’s how we managed to film the day in Perugia in the fall of 2011 when Amanda and Raffaele were acquitted.”

What the documentary makes clear is that despite the limited amount of solid information available to the media around the world at the beginning of the saga, almost everyone and anyone back then felt they were privy to the real and only truth about both the protagonists and the countries they came from. An old clip of Donald Trump—yes, him—actually shows him calling for a boycott of Italy after Knox’s conviction. As Blackhurst pointed out, in a rare moment of inserting his own opinion, “Who was he at the time to be calling for a boycott of Italy?”

But perhaps the most impressive aspect of the film is its emphasis on the humanity of the characters it presents. Even Mignini pauses for a moment on-camera and reflects.

“If they are innocent, I hope they can forget the suffering they endured,” says the prosecutor.
Forget? Doubtful. Very doubtful.